The Daily Show had a great segment on the British elections last night, comparing video clips of a question-and-answer session given by Blair before the election--in which he was yelled at, called a liar, and even the moderator gave him some flak--compared to our American "town hall meetings," where only approved questions get asked and half weren't even questions, they were just statements of how great Bush is.

Okay, so what's a Tory? I presume the meaning has changed somewhat since my last use of the term referred to American Colonists who supported the crown and were often borderline traitors ...

In modern political terms Wolf, a Tory is a Conservative Party supporter/member , traditionally the right wing of English party politics. So Tory=Conservative.

Historically the word defined politicians against change in a variety of settings, and I believe they were royalists, but that is now linguistically redundant. In fact its now difficult to identify a serious political difference between Labour and Tory since New Labour has moved to the centre-right and Conservatives are already there. To paraphrase Princess Diana, the middle ground is rather crowded at the moment.

It leaves the Liberal Democrats, an (amalgam of disenchanted old Labour and and even older Liberals) to occupy the now vacant left wing position. They were for instance the only party anti the current war/conflict/whatever you want to call it. Many formerly Old Labour supporters (myself included) have changed allegiance from Labour to LibDem but its more complicated than that. General loathing of Blair has also caused many Labour voters to temporarily switch allegiance as a protest vote. Some will return, many won't. In today's press his membership is calling for the swift removal of Blair as the albatross around the neck of the party, so this will prove interesting.

This might be an interesting term, labour is weak enough now that all the shit-stirring oldskool left-wing MPs that Blair could safely tell to go fuck themselves are now needed and the LibDems as well, we might even see electoral reform that would make the LibDems a very serious contender in the next election.